I have a friend who's brainstorming a dwarven undercity campaign, using procedural generation to fill in a minihexmap as the characters explore a multi-level ruined-city megadungeon. These are my thoughts on the mechanics of moving around the megadungeon. The point of writing this is to try to think through some of the mechanical structure so that he can worry about the content. I'm using DCC as my base here, but my friend could relatively easily convert these ideas to work in B/X or any other system.
Humans and elves in DCC have a base movement speed of 30. Dwarves and halflings have a speed of 20. Characters with the Wild Child birth augur can have their speed altered by plus-or-minus 5, 10, or 15 depending on their starting Luck score. Wearing heavy armor can slow characters down. Wearing scale, chain, or banded mail imposes a movement penalty of -5, and wearing half or full plate imposes -10. So a DCC adventuring party without animals is usually going to have a group speed of 20 or 30.
Dogs move 40. Donkeys and mules have speed 30, ponies have speed 40, and both horses and warhorses have speed 60.
I propose to treat a character's speed as their movement points. Navigating the dwarven undercity requires spending movement points to explore and travel between hexes. The slowest character in the party determines how far the party can travel without anyone needing to forced march. The fastest characters in the party can take advantage of their speed to scout ahead and report back.
Hexes are approximately a mile across.
Although travel times are given too, the need for rest is based on using movement points, rather than the passage of time. Characters need to stop for the night and rest once they get to 0 movement points. Continuing to travel beyond that requires forced marching, which entails some element of risk. You could require that the characters have to stop to briefly rest around the time they use half their movement points, but unless you plan to have something happen during that rest, or just really want to narrate it for realism's sake, there's no reason to. (Alternatively, ignore the movement points, and use the travel times to establish the adventuring day. Travel up to 8 hours is as normal, going longer carries the risks of forced marching. Characters with low movement rates due to their species or encumbrance may begin forced marching after only 6 hours.)
Entering a hex is "free," but passing through it to come back out costs 0, 2.5, 5, or 10 movement points, depending on the terrain and on whether or the characters are exploring or crossing through a space they've already explored.
Terrain types
There are at least three common types of hexes in the dwarven undercity - caverns, passages, and mazes. There may be other common types that will need to be detailed later. There may also be special or unique hexes that would never show up on a general list. (Cavegirl's Game Stuff's The Gardens of Ynn might be a useful tool for thinking about what these uncommon hexes might be like.)
Cavern hexes
Movement point cost: Caverns cost 2.5 to explore initially, 0 to cross after exploration. Some caverns contain difficult terrain (such as weed-like or forest-like stalagmites) and cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns are relatively rare.
Time cost: Caverns take an hour to explore, half an hour to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross.
Cavern hexes are mostly filled with giant, wide-open caverns. They make ideal building sites and contain 1d6 or 1d8 significant structures. They contain 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Unlike in passages and mazes, the structures are not tied to particular exits and should all be considered central.
It is impossible to get lost in a cavern hex.
Passage hexes
Movement point cost: Passages cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some passages are very easy to navigate. They have wider corridors, simpler layouts, and/or better signage. These cost 2.5 to explore and 0 to cross. Some passages are more difficult to navigate. These are narrower, more winding, contain stairs or other changes of elevation, etc. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Both easy and difficult passages are relatively rare.
Time cost: Most passages take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Easy passages take only an hour to explore, half an hour to cross. Difficult passages take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Passage hexes are mostly filled with halls and corridors used to facilitate navigation between structures. Passage hexes contain 1d4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Most structures are associated with a particular exit, and either can or must be accessed to use that exit. Occasionally there are central structures that can be accessed freely by anyone passing through the hex. Even the first time they explore the hex, players can always choose which exit they use to leave the passages.
It is almost impossible to get lost in a passage hex. Difficult passages have narrow walls, long winding stretches, sharp turns, weird angles, and other features that slow down movement, but, they do not present a navigational hazard. Like caverns, they can be considered fully explored after a single crossing, and unlike mazes, they carry almost no risk of losing one's way (unless the party fumbles their exploration.)
Maze hexes
Movement point cost: Mazes cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some mazes are especially difficult to navigate. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Because of the risk of getting lost, and the need to fully map a maze before it can be considered explored, difficult mazes are a nightmare for adventuring parties. Difficult mazes are relatively rare.
Time cost: Mazes take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Difficult mazes take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Maze hexes are filled with halls and corridors laid out to confuse and misdirect the traveler. Maze hexes contain 1d8-4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Structures in a maze are always associated with an exit. If there are more structures than visible exits (including the characters' original entrance), then the extra structures contain secret exits. The only way to find a central structure in a maze (at least initially) is to get lost.
Exploring mazes: Mazes take much longer to explore than normal passage hexes. They are designed to thwart navigation and make stymie mapmakers. Fully exploring a maze requires multiple passes through the structure. The characters must leave a maze by each of its exits in order to fully map the maze. Since all maze hexes contain an original entrance and at least one exit, it always takes at least two trips through the maze to fully map it. Getting lost in the maze does not count toward meeting the exploration requirements. (I know, I know, in real life, getting lost in a place a few times really does eventually make it easier to find your way around. Either dwarven mazes are too confusing for that to work, or if the ref is feeling generous, getting lost means that you roll +1d the next time you try to explore it.)
Until a maze is fully mapped the characters can either choose to travel a known route or leave via a random exit. Traveling a known route doesn't let you go any faster, count toward your exploration requirements, or run any less risk of getting lost, but it does let you pick which exit you use to leave the hex. Leaving via a random exit maps one route, putting you one trip closer to mastering the maze, and requires rolling 1d5, 1d4, 1d3, or 1d2 to determine which exit (including the original entrance) you use to leave the hex. For obvious reasons, when there's only one unmapped route left, you don't have to roll the dice, you just go the only way you haven't gone before. Once a maze is fully mapped, you can pretty much treat it like passages.
Getting lost in a maze: Mazes are designed to make you lost, so this is a fairly regular occurrence. Getting lost doesn't count toward your mapping totals. Typically, getting lost either means ending up back in the hex you started from before you entered the maze. Less commonly, you might end up stuck in the maze, or if you're lucky, you might find yourself outside a random exit. The other thing that might happen, if you're lucky, is you might discover a lost wonder of the dwarven underworld. (This can happen in passages too, but since getting lost there is rarer, so is finding forgotten wonders.) Lost wonders are cool, long-forgotten structures and treasures that you can only find by getting lost. There are two ways to handle this. One way would be to have a special encounter table for lost characters, and to include finding a lost wonder as a possible encounter. The other way would be to use a Luck check to resolve what happens when you get lost, and make finding a lost wonder the best possible result of the Luck check.
Exploring the dwarven underworld: When the characters traverse a hex from their entrance to one of the exits, this generally counts as exploring the hex. (It's possible to fumble this in a passage, and mazes of course require multiple trips through to fully explore.) After they've explored the hex, characters can simply cross it thereafter.
The lead character in the party's marching order makes the exploration check. In passages and mazes, this is the roll that determines if you get lost or not. Other consequences TBD. If a character scouted ahead and reported back, and that character then leads the party through the hex, that hex can be considered already-explored. (Something like this also applies for return trips to the undercity bringing along new characters.) Probably rolling the exploration check involves rolling d10 if you're untrained, d20 if you're trained due to your occupation or class. (Since it's a dwarven undercity, I would imagine that all dwarves are considered trained.)
I'm not sure if you should have to roll an exploration check if you're just crossing the hex. If you do, you should either get to make the roll using larger dice, or have a friendlier table to roll on. I guess it depends on whether the exploration check is just to see if you get lost, or if it also functions as the wandering monster check. That might be good, because the person you want to help you avoid getting lost isn't necessarily the person you want in front if you need to sneak past a sleeping monster, or negotiate with a dwarven guard patrol, or lead the charge in a fight. (It could be the same person, but it's not guaranteed.) The exploration check should be a separate roll however, from any rolls that are used to procedurally generate the contents of the hex. (Your exploration roll shouldn't determine if the next hex you move into is a cavern or a maze, for example.)
Structures
Depending on the hex type, a hex may contain one or more significant structures. (Or it could be empty, although I guess the numbers I given so far make it impossible for anything but mazes to be structure-free. Hmm...) The terrain type determines both the number and the type of structures. Depending on the type of hex, structures could be things like dwarven mine-works, small caves, monster lairs, burial sites, temples/shrines, residential buildings, barracks, workshops, vaults. Presumably important public buildings are mostly located in caverns, whereas mazes mostly contain things that they want to protect or hide (like graves and vaults, maybe) or things that appear as the result of neglect (like shantytowns and monster lairs). Also, I'm calling these "significant structures" because you could imagine in-significant structures being part of the set dressing in passages or caverns. (You could walk past a row of dwarven office-worker cubicles that contain no personal effects, or there could be a block of spartan dwarven apartments that you have no need to enter or search.) This is the content that you're filling the the undercity with.
Significant structures should be like minidungeons. Ideally, it should take considerably less than a single game session to explore one structure. You might have some of these pre-keyed and waiting to be used, others could be procedurally-generated right there at the table, as long as the procedures are fast enough. Dwarven mine-works, for example, might be 1-6 rooms, with the room-types weighted toward long passages leading away from the entry. Dwarven buildings could have a handful of stock blueprints, which are then filled up using random tables. Characters should be able to explore multiple structures as a routine part of almost every session. Hexes that contain special/unique locations could contain large buildings that take one or more sessions to explore.
Secret doors
There are a few ways to get secret doors. In a maze, if there are more exits than structures, then some of the exits are hidden. Also, you may have noticed that I'm suggesting that each hex have between 2-5 ways in and out. There are no true dead-ends using the procedures I've laid out, but there are also no hexes without any barriers between them and the others. These barriers lead to secret doors in two ways. One way is, you go into a hex and roll for the number of exits. The number you get is larger than the number of unblocked sides (or, when you're randomly determining which sides have exits, you get a side that's blocked.) Voila, that exit is hidden. Also, there are going to be some hexes, or even some small areas that seem to be fully blocked off from the rest of the undercity. For each hex or area like that, random procedure decides if it's truly solid rock, or open but only accessible from a higher or lower level, or open but only accessible by secret door, or open but accessible both by secret door and stairs from above or below.
By the way, what happens if you know from its surroundings that a hex has more exits than you just rolled when you finally entered it? That means something has happened to make one of those exits unusable for now, and you're either going to have to quest for it or negotiate with a faction to get that connector fixed.
Dwarven factions
I don't know what my friend's plans are, but I do want to point out that the OSR has created a plethora of usable dwarf-types. Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons and Slumbering Ursine Dunes has given us robo-dwarves and caveman dwarves. Jason Sholtis of Dungeon Dozen and Operation Unfathomable has written gray dwarves, blue dwarves, and bat-winged dwarves. This is to say nothing of all the dwarven subtypes that Wizards and Paizo have published. Thanks to the Open Gaming License, those (or some re-written version of them) are all available for any dwarf-themed project.
Okay, I think that's enough brainstorming for now. With this framework, and some minor tweaking, one has the beginnings of the procedures necessary to start creating a dwarven city megadungeon for DCC characters to explore. You'd need to start with a blank hexmap that has the outline of the first level of the city. The terrain types here give you the start of a procedure to fill in the hexes as the characters explore, and the times and movement rates lay out how much they can explore per day. (You'd still need tables to decide "what's in this cavern?" and "which significant structures are in these passages?", etc, but this is a start.)
Camping and staying overnight in dwarven houses is pretty much mandatory after the first few forays, although intelligent use of horses and scouts could let the players focus on in-and-out play for awhile before they start going deeper. The use of passages should keep the whole place feeling more like a dungeon and less like some gigantic open space, without the same slowdown that mazes create. The use of structures should also prevent it from feeling like you're always in abstract space, while keeping the structures mostly very small should prevent getting so caught up in exploring individual buildings that you have no time to move across the larger structure. I'm trying to thread a needle, basically, but I think these procedures should avoid several undesirable outcomes ("undesirable" for the goal of feeling like you're in a sprawling dwarven warren, anyway). Only playtesting will reveal if I got it right, or show up where the mistakes are and the fixes are needed.
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